No More Learning

p. 182. Answer to a Child's Question. I have omitted the four lines,
printed in brackets in Campbell's edition, which were omitted, I think
rightly, by Coleridge in reprinting the poem from the _Morning Post_
of October 16, 1802.

p. 183. _Lines on a Child_. This exquisite fragment is printed in
Coleridge's works in a prefatory note to the prose "Wanderings of Cain. " It
was written, he tells us, "for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment
on the metre, as a specimen" of what was to have been a long poem, in
imitation of "The Death of Abel," written in collaboration with Wordsworth.
"The Ancient Mariner was written instead. "

p. 188. _The two Round Spaces on the Tombstone_. This poem was printed
in the _Morning Post_ of December 4, 180O, under the title: "The two
Round Spaces: a Skeltoniad;" and it is this text which is here given, from
Campbell's edition. The "fellow from Aberdeen" was Sir James Mackintosh.
Coleridge apologised for reprinting the verses, "with the hope that they
will be taken, as assuredly they were composed, in mere sport. " No apology
was needed; they are the most rich, ripe, and Rabelaisian comic verses he
ever wrote, full-bodied and exultant in their exuberance of wayward and
good-humoured satire.

p. 192. _Sonnets Attempted in the Manner of Contemporary Writers_.
Dykes Campbell quotes a letter of Coleridge to Cottle, which he attributes
to the year 1797, in which Coleridge says: "I sent to the _Monthly
Magazine_ three mock sonnets in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles
Lloyd's, and Charles Lamb's, etc. etc. , exposing that affectation of
unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent, in commonplace epithets,
flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and
mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc. etc. The
instances were all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb. I signed them
'Nehemiah Higginbottom. ' I think they may do good to our young Bards. "

Coleridge's humour, which begins as early as 1794, with the lines on
"Parliamentary Oscillators," is one of the outlets of an oppressively
ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to
express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the
grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque
rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which
seems to exult in its mastery over material so foreign to it.

Yet he has not always or wholly command of this humour.